Trafficking in Children
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2010 Sweatshop Hall of Shame
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How Birth Certificates Save Lives
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What the Media Won't Tell You About Child Prostitution
Business Groups Oppose Ban on Child and Slave-Made Products
Published November 14, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Rachel Maddow's choice of "you child labor-endorsing, pro-slavery freaks" to describe business groups' opposition to a bill that would ban the import of goods made by child labor or slave labor was pretty apt. However, I personally would describe the move as the most stunning display of corporate douchebaggery since Walmart's "dead peasant's insurance" fiasco. According to a recent report from Inside U.S. Trade, business interest groups are "worried" that a legislative ban on goods made by children and slaves could prompt the government to more actively seek out and identify consumer goods made by exploited people. And if we started doing that, well then businesses might have to start giving workers their rights, paying them a living wage, not abusing children, and freeing their indentured slaves. And then where would we be?
Here's Maddow's analysis (the relevant part of the video starts about 3:30 in):
My colleague (and frequent guest poster) Tim Newman also has a great analysis of the history of legislative attempt to ban goods made with child and slave labor here. Last year, the International Labor Rights Forum took Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to task for trying to block a voluntary child labor free certification initiative in the Farm Bill. The initiative passed, despite the lobbying of interest groups. History shows that despite the powerful corporate lobby, grassroots activists can be just as powerful a voice for children and workers as high ticket lobbyists can be for corporations.
What Is Child Labor?
Published November 07, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
When I was 16, I got my first official job as a hostess at an Applebees is the suburbs of Atlanta, GA. It wasn't the most emotionally fulfilling job I've ever worked, but I made $6.50 a hour (slightly above minimum wage at the time) and my co-workers were nice to me. Before that, at the tender age of 14, I babysat for a family who lived in my neighborhood a few nights a month. At 14 or 16, was I a child laborer? No. My teenage jobs could technically be considered "child labor", but that's not what the term has come to mean.
The term "child labor" is most often used to refer to regular, sustained labor by minors and has a connotation of exploitative or unethical conditions. For example, children who must work to support their families, who are prevented from attending school due to working, who work in dangerous or degrading jobs, or who can't control their working conditions are often considered child laborers. Sometimes, questions of child labor are clear. I was clearly not a child laborer at Applebees because I still went to school, I was free to leave, and my work wasn't dangerous or demeaning (unless you count the time I spilled hot chili con carne on a rather large biker). For children in slavery, in prostitution, or who work long hours instead of going to school, child labor is an appropriate term. The technical meaning could include my job, but when the term "child labor" is used it generally refers to children who work under some type of exploitattive conditions. It's important to understand that when we talk about child labor, we're talking about exploitation and abuse.
Doctors Arrested for Faking Infants' Deaths to Sell Them
Published November 06, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Three doctors and one nurse were arrested just outside of Mexico City yesterday for a child trafficking operation that involved fabricating the deaths of newborns and then selling the babies on the black market for profit. Whether the children were sold to parents desperate for a child or for more nefarious purposes is not yet clear. Nor is whether any of the infants were trafficked into the U.S.
What kind of sick and heartless beasts came up with this strategy? Did it start around the water cooler like this:
Evil Doctor 1: Hey, I'd love to make some money to supplement my doctor's salary, which is not quite enough to buy those jet skis. Anyone got any ideas?
Evil Doctor 2: Well, we've got all these babies just lying around the hospital, why don't we try selling some of them?
Evil Nurse: Who wants to buy a baby? Babies are expensive to take care of.
Evil Doctor 2: Oh, lots of people want to buy babies for all sorts of reasons.
Kraft Foods Commits to Buy More Sustainable Cocoa
Published November 05, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
Kraft Foods, makers of Chips Ahoy and Oreo cookies (among others) has committed to buy 30,000 tons of Rain Forest Alliance certified cocoa beans to use in their products. In 2005, Kraft bought a smaller amount of certified beans from Cote d'Ivoire, but this move indicates a stronger commitment to fair and sustainable cocoa than ever before. Good job, Kraft Foods, for making a good choice in where your cocoa comes from.
As I've mentioned many times before, child labor, human trafficking, and abuses of workers are rampant in the cocoa industry, especially along the West Coast of Africa. Children enslaved and abused in the cocoa industry are made to work excruciatingly long days, and are often beaten if they try and leave or refuse to work. Many have been forced to pick cocoa with open wounds or covered in their own excrement. The cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast where some of the worst cases of child slavery and labor exploitation have been found are also the world's largest supplier of cocoa, making up 40% of the global market. The cocoa industry needs reform, and it needs it now.
"No Good Jobs": Sokha and Makara's True Story of Slavery
Published November 05, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Sokha and Makara's stories were originally collected by Stop the Traffick. In this case, a serious family illness put these young girls at risk for trafficking. Often, when given the choice between sending a child to work and watching another family member die, parents will send their children away with desparte hopes of money. Here is their story:
Sokha and Makara are from Poipet in Cambodia. When they were just 14 and 15 years old, their mother was ill with a liver problem. The family needed money to pay for the medicine to treat her. They also hoped to buy some land to build a home. A man promised good jobs for the girls in nearby Thailand, and offered the family some money if they would let them go. Sokha and Makara were excited at the thought of being able to help the family with the money they earned. The reality turned out to be very different.
The man was a trafficker. There were no ‘good jobs' for the girls in Thailand. Sokha's mother died within a year, and the family couldn't afford to buy the land that they had dreamed of. Sokha, who is now 17, says, ‘I felt cheated. The traffickers used us for slave jobs, and while they earned lots of money, we only got enough to feed ourselves each day.' She explains how she and Makara, 16, were given jobs selling fruit, but it did not pay enough. So they were forced to work even harder and to do work that they didn't enjoy.
Sokha and Makara's story has a happy ending because of the Cambodian Hope Organization (CHO) that works with Tearfund, a relief and development agency. Sokha and Makara's parents met with CHO and gave them photos to pass on to an organization in Thailand that rescues trafficked girls. The girls were found and rescued about a year after their ordeal started.
What is unusual about this story is not that the sisters were trafficked, but that they were kept together for the duration of their enslavement. Many traffickers will try and isolate and disorient victims, which often means cutting them off from friends and family. However, having a sister close by may have been the key to helping these two young women survive slavery.
Photo credit: thomaswanhoff
Bacha Bazi: Afghan Tradition Expolits Young Boys
Published November 02, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Two subjects within the field of human trafficking are too often ignored: cultural traditions of slavery and the sale of boys in the commercial sex industry. CNN recently shed light on both of these in an article about the Afghan tradition of bacha bazi, or "boy play". It's a cultural tradition for many powerful Afghan men, but it's modern-day slavery for the boys who live through it.
Bacha bazi is illegal in Afghanistan, but the practice is still thriving. Boys are taken from their families at a young age and sold or given to wealthy and powerful business men, politicians, and military commanders. The boys are dressed in women's clothing and makeup and forced to dance to entertain their master and his guests. They are also forced to perform sex acts on their master or his guests. The few boys who are able to escape their slavery have a difficult time ever making a living doing anything else. They are forever branded in society as a bacha bereesh, or a "boy without a beard," a boy who dances and dresses as a woman.
Their plight is not unlike that of women forced into sexual performance or prostitution, who also have a difficult time being accepted into society and finding work after their ordeal. Bacha bazi boys often return to the industry even after they have left, because they have no other means to support themselves. Women who have been forced into commercial sex often do the same. Perhaps so many similarities exist because bacha bazi feminizes these boys in order to degrade them. By forcing them to perform in women's clothes and by raping them, this tradition not only seeks to humiliate these boys for the pleasure of wealthy men, but also to reinforce the idea that women are inferior and for a boy to have feminine affectations is degrading for him. It's a window into the severe gender inequality that pervades Afghanistan.
What I found most interesting about bacha bazi is the prevalence of a tradition based around same sex rape and gender-bending performance in a severely homophobic country like Afghanistan.
Sex Buys Survival for Runaway Kids
Published October 28, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
Nothing calls attention to an issue like an article in the New York Times, and this time the media giant has deigned to shine its blinding spotlight upon domestic minor sex trafficking -- sorta. Never once in the article does the author use the term "trafficking victim" the describe the children in question -- American kids who run away from home and end up in prostitution either for survival or under pimp control. But legally in the U.S., any child under 18 involved in commercial sex is a trafficking victim. Semantics aside, though, the issue of American youth coerced and forced into prostitution by pimps is a significant and growing problem.
Author Ian Urbina gives prostituted runaway youth a face in Roxanne L., a 16-year-old girl from Queens who was picked up for prostitution. Dan Garrabrant, the detective questioning her, has only one hour before he must turn her over to social services. If in that hour he can get her to admit that she has a pimp, he can get her off the street and into victim services. He tries everything -- pushing, commiserating, talking about other stuff, offering safety -- but nothing can get her to admit that she has a pimp. His initials are tatooed on her body, but she denies he even exists overt and over. At the end of the interview, Garrabrant is forced to release Roxanne to a youth shelter. Her body is found several days later, killed by the pimp she insisted never existed. Roxanne is not the first, nor will she be the last, child to die at the hands of her pimp.
Out of the 1.6 million children who run away from home each year, about one third (or over 530,000) trade sex acts for tools of survival like food, shelter, warmth, drugs to feed an addiction, or the promise of protection and companionship.
